Best Practices Blog

MSPs and UPSs: Common Currents

The main role of uninterruptible power supplies, as I mentioned in a previous post, is that they should be an integral part of backup and disaster recovery solutions or business continuity plans rolled out by MSPs to end clients.

The role of any UPS is to provide short-term power when primary power sources at a physical location fail.

Here are five common areas where UPSs are useful:

Total power failure: That's obvious, loss of input voltage in a building means game over, you don't want that for your systems.

Power sag: The lights are not out but perhaps they are blinking, power is not at full capacity, it's weak and there is a reduction in power causing your systems to slow – not enough juice.

Power spike: This is simply two much juice. A short from too much voltage can also mean game over for a system.

Frequency instability: When a power source is unreliable, only working sporadically or subject to temporary shifts in the power lines that bring that voltage to your location.

It's along these lines that you as an MSP will be able to decide which UPS units are best suited for your clients' needs or even your needs if you provide hosted services or act as a data center or storage environment for your clients.

UPSs are divided into categories based on which of these for common problems they address.

If any or all of these are either common or events you'd like to avoid causing downtime in your processing environments, seek out your UPS units accordingly.